


for a moment there, i thought we were in trouble

by ghost_teeth



Series: the fall will probably kill you [1]
Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Drinking, Fantasizing, M/M, Mutual Masturbation, Porn with Feelings, Semi-Public Sex, Touch-Starved, Yearning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:08:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27815836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_teeth/pseuds/ghost_teeth
Summary: “Lookit that,” Cobb hears from some dry throat—his own, maybe. His hand is moving without his permission, darting out to crawl like a pale spider up the knobby topography of the Mandalorian’s exposed nape to pinch a single sweat-limp curl of dark hair between his index finger and thumb. “Human after all, eh?”
Relationships: Din Djarin/Cobb Vanth
Series: the fall will probably kill you [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2190045
Comments: 83
Kudos: 724





	for a moment there, i thought we were in trouble

**Author's Note:**

> quick note before we get started—i couldn’t find the weequay bartender’s name anywhere, so if there is a canon name that i missed, please let me know. thanks!

He’d tried to describe it once, years ago, drunk and warm and leaning into some strange shoulder in a Mos Eisley cantina. _Wouldn’t get it unless you’re from here. Hurts your teeth, kind of,_ he recalls murmuring into a half-attentive tympanum as a cool and many-fingered hand drifted up his thigh (toward his pocket, he’d later realize when he went to settle his bill). 

It’s the sensation that makes itself known now—an ache in the gums, a tightness behind the eyes, a stiffness in the wrists—even as Cobb tosses back a shot of something that tastes like an industrial solvent. He sucks his teeth and grimaces, not entirely from the drink. 

“Sandstorm comin’,” he announces to no one in particular, and a muttered chorus of agreement ripples through the cantina’s sparse assembly.

The celebration’s been and gone, for the most part, leaving in its wake those with no good reason to go home just yet. This is the alone-together crowd, those with regular seats and mile-long tabs. They’re all frosted like tea cakes with sweat and dust, many of them green to the elbows with barely-dry dragon ichor. Although the clamor of the party has long since died down, a palpable sense of self-satisfaction hangs over even this hard-drinking crowd, the delicious bone-deep burn of physical labor and hard-won success a pleasant mixer for the liquor. But there’s a sandstorm coming, they can all feel it— _wouldn’t get it unless you’re from here_ —and even this little gathering will trickle out soon in search of some quiet bolt-hole to wait it out.

Cobb’s in his usual spot, back to a supportive column and feet kicked up on the table, a colorful battery of imported bottom-shelf shots waiting in a neat little line beside his filthy boots. He reaches for a little glass bulb of something pink and opaque and downs it before settling back and tucking his hands into his armpits. As it is, Tatooine nights bring a creeping chill that crawls beneath clothes and settles in like a full-body toothache, but it’s always worse just before a sandstorm. There’s no hiding from this kind of cold; it’s somehow sharper, cruel and almost clever in the way it finds access through every degraded window seal and crooked door. 

Not for the first time tonight, Cobb finds himself missing the by-now-familiar weight of the Mandalorian armor on his shoulders, the snug fit of the vambraces. The armor didn’t provide much in the way of warmth, true, but there was a certain sense of invulnerability that came with wearing it that he’ll miss. It was comforting, in its way. 

Cobb shifts lower in his seat, tries to gather all his limbs in tighter against the insidious chill. These days, he’s all terrible angles and leather gone tough under twin suns, not nearly enough padding for his own comfort or anyone else’s. He’d almost forgotten, tucked away in a durasteel exoskeleton. He wonders when he got so old, so thin. Small. He wonders vaguely if he’s been slowly shrinking for years and didn’t notice until now.

The windows wheeze shut in anticipation of the storm, and the last-call lights come on, dousing the cantina in their toxic orange glow. There’s another shotglass in Cobb’s hand, something caustic-green and fizzing gently, and he turns it in his fingers, considering the way the light trips across the glass’s chipped rim. He thinks of the way sunlight winks off an empty helmet’s viewplate as it disappears over a dune, borne away on the back of a speeder. He thinks of the silhouette of the man astride the speeder, hazy enough that he might just be heat-shimmer picked out in wobbling silver lines against a pale sky. He thinks of the threadbareness of his own red shirt and of the man beneath it.

He thinks of the thirsty distance between Mos Pelgo and Mos Eisley, of the terrible speed of a sandstorm, and he throws back the shot with more violence than strictly necessary.

 _Marshal,_ he hears in the hazy distance, and as he pulls his attention back to the present the sound resolves itself into Uluq’s rumbling voice. The Weequay bartender is sweeping spent glasses and cups off tables into a tub of dubious cleanliness, and Cobb knows better than to expect they’ll be given anything more than a cursory rinse before being pressed back into service tomorrow night. The cantina has emptied out completely—when did that happen? 

“Whannow?” Cobb clears his throat and rummages around in the wreckage of his brain for some consonants. He tries again: “What’s that now, Uluq?”

“Closin’ up, Marshal,” Uluq repeats, and deposits the rattling dish tub on the bar counter. “In or out for the night, pick one.” 

It’s an understanding they’ve struck, the two of them—some nights, the two klicks to the little pale hump in the sand Cobb calls home is just too far to manage, and well, it never hurts to have someone to keep half an eye on the place overnight. Besides that, the Marshal’s always kept an honest tab. He’s good for anything he might help himself to in Uluq’s absence, always has been. 

“In, I think,” Cobb says around a yawn that makes his jaw click. He’ll pay for it with interest, of course, between clothes gone crunchy with grime and a back that’ll scream blue murder for days. But booze slows him down, and the popping of his joints reminds him there’s a sandstorm coming. 

Uluq grunts his acknowledgment and, after secreting away the night’s take, heads for the door. He touches a knuckle to his craggy brow as a silent _good evening_ as he passes Cobb’s table, and the door hisses closed behind him. 

A sandstorm always starts quiet, building like a slow migraine at first before the full violence of it descends all at once. Cobb feels more than hears the first whispers of the storm, the distant roar of it buzzing in the roots of his teeth, humming in his sinuses. The air tastes different just before a sandstorm, too, he’s always thought—coppery-sharp, sour with potential. Cobb licks his teeth and decides that this is going to be a bad one.

The first real onslaught of the storm rattles the windows and shrieks through a gap in the door like a whistling teakettle, but the cantina has weathered worse. Having gone through his flight of adventurous liquors, Cobb heaves himself up out of his seat and slouches to the bar to pour himself a sloppy snort of spotchka. The briny bite of it always manages to settle his stomach, somehow. 

The wind is merciless at the door, pounding as if with invisible fists, rattling it on its track as if desperately seeking entrance. Cobb sips his spotchka, eyeing the door thoughtfully. If he didn’t know better, he might almost think there _was_ someone out there, clamoring for sanctuary. 

It’s the sharp report of a blaster demolishing the feeble locking mechanism that finally convinces him that maybe his theory wasn’t too wide of the mark. 

Cobb’s own blaster is in his hand, trained with surprising steadiness on the entrance well before gloved fingers insinuate themselves beneath the door and manually wrench it upward. 

There’s a monster in the doorway, some subterranean devil vomited up by the living sand. Cobb politely waits for it to enter and shut the door behind it before firing a warning shot at its feet. The monster draws back barely half a step before whirling to face him, and Cobb finds himself staring down the barrel of a blaster and into a T-shaped viewplate barely visible beneath a crust of packed sand.

“Oh,” says Cobb.

“Vanth,” says the Mandalorian. 

“Baahh,” says the Mandalorian’s cuirass. 

There’s still half a glass of spotchka in Cobb’s other hand. Helplessly, he raises it to his mouth and tips the rest of it back. 

“Are you going to shoot us, Vanth?” The Mandalorian’s helmet tilts, and somehow, even through the muffling effect of the modulator, his voice rasps like he’s been half-mummified. 

Belatedly, Cobb realizes that he’s still got his blaster trained on the Mandalorian. “Oh,” he says, and tucks it into the back of his trousers. “No, sorry.” The Mandalorian lowers his own weapon (slower than Cobb might have liked), and the two of them stand there like that for a long strange moment, staring at one another from across an empty cantina while a sandstorm wails to beat the band outside. 

The Mandalorian jerks a thumb stiffly over his shoulder at the ruined door. “I’m going to pay to fix that,” he says.

“Mmm-nnnnuh,” his cuirass adds helpfully. 

Gathering the remaining scraps of his shredded nerves around himself, Cobb sinks onto a low stool and loops his elbows over his knees. “Was wondering how far you two’d get before the storm caught you.” 

Something in the angle of the Mandalorian’s helmet effectively conveys the depth of his exhaustion and irritation. “Not far enough,” he grunts.

Clearly, Cobb notes, they caught a proper taste of a Tatooine sandstorm’s wrath before staggering into the cantina—the Mandalorian is helmet-to-boot dust, the silvery glow of his armor almost entirely smothered in caked-on grit. He’d still been all-over sticky with whatever foul secretions a krayt dragon’s gullet produces when he blazed away on the speeder, Cobb remembers, and barely manages to smother an inappropriate laugh. 

The Mandalorian’s gloved fingers are fumbling at the catches of his chestplate, and the sand-caked armor comes away with an audible crunch. Enormous dark eyes and a snubby little nose materialize over the top of the cuirass, followed by a series of violent sneezes.

“Sorry, kid,” the Mandalorian mutters, extracting the little green child from beneath his armor and setting him gently atop a table. The kid is grimy and looks a little crumpled, huge ears pinned back like an annoyed loth-cat, but he seems to have been spared the worst of the storm. He sneezes again, pointedly, and shoots the Mandalorian a mournful look.

Cobb waves a hand vaguely in the direction of the bar. “Help yourselves to anything, I’ll just put it on my tab.” 

The Mandalorian is silent for a moment, visor ticking subtly between the bar and Cobb. With the immediate crisis averted, he seems to be taking stock of the scene properly for the first time. “Do you... live here?” he asks finally.

This time Cobb does laugh, a high strange bark that echoes around the empty cantina. “Naw, just keepin’ an eye on the place for the night,” he says. It’s not totally untrue. He hoists himself up out of his seat and saunters over to stand behind the bar, vaguely hoping the tipsy sway in his walk isn’t terribly noticeable. Smiling lazily, he leans across the counter, weight on his elbows. “C’mon, then. What can I getcha, stranger? Your credit’s good here.” His fingertips tap out a rhythmless tattoo on the countertop.

“Water,” the Mandalorian says after another one of those inscrutable silences. “Or milk, if you have it. For the kid.”

Cobb gives a low whistle. “Leave it to you to order the most expensive thing on the menu.” A quick appraisal of the bar’s stock turns up a half-empty pitcher of cloudy water drawn from the cantina’s poorly-maintained moisture vaporator, as well as a canister of bantha milk that doesn’t smell too sinister. He excavates a few dishes of dubious cleanliness from beneath the counter, pours two glasses of water and a bowl of milk and pushes them across the bar.

The Mandalorian takes one of the glasses of water and places it in front of the child, but withholds the bowl of milk. The child squints skeptically at the water for a second before blowing a slobbery raspberry and grabbing in the direction of the bowl. “No, water first. Then you can have this.” The Mandalorian wags a stern finger at the child, who takes two perfunctory, spiteful sips of water and then grabs for the bowl again, little claws clicking. The bowl of milk is surrendered without a fight. 

Watching this, Cobb feels his insides wobble dangerously. He wonders if he’s about to vomit.

With the kid thoroughly engaged in sloshing blue milk down his front and all over the table, the Mandalorian lowers himself onto a stool and sits there rigid as a stone idol. It’s difficult to tell for sure, but Cobb gets the impression he’s being stared at from behind the filthy visor. “Can you actually see through that right now?” he finds himself asking aloud, wiggling his fingers at his own face.

“Yes,” the Mandalorian says, then, after a beat, “Mostly.”

Cobb snags a dingy bar towel from the counter, balls it up and flings it across the room. It’s a lousy toss, but the Mandalorian manages to snatch it out of the air anyway and seems to examine it for a moment. He nods his thanks before tipping out one precious dribble of water from the kid’s glass onto the rag and setting about scrubbing the worst of the dirt from his viewplate.

Outside, the wind howls at an unholy volume. Even safe behind the substantial walls of the cantina, it’s like standing far too close to an overheating repulsor. “We were barely two hours out,” the Mandalorian says in response to the unasked question, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the storm. Cobb doesn’t know the man well, so he can’t say for sure, but there seems to be an undercurrent of embarrassment in that distorted voice. “Nowhere to wait it out. It was safer to just turn around and come back.”

“Blazing off into the sunset like that was very dramatic and all, don’t get me wrong,” Cobb drawls, pasting on his best shithead grin. “But running right back and then breaking and entering sort of ruins the effect a bit.” He thinks he’s at least earned the right to razz the Mandalorian a bit, if nothing else.

The Mandalorian’s only response is a low, barely audible chuffing noise—a laugh? A cough? It’s hard to say. 

“Anyway,” Cobb continues. “Seems you’re stuck for a while. It’s a bad one. Might as well get comfortable.”

“Brrrb,” the child trills from its perch atop the table. The milk dribbling down his chin has combined with the film of sandstorm dust to form a sort of violently blue paste, and the effect is alarming. The Mandalorian makes an abortive move to blot the child’s chin with his towel, but then looks at the dismal state of the cloth and seems to think better of it. Wordlessly, Cobb retrieves another ancient rag from behind the bar and tosses it over. A few more drops of water on the new cloth, then the Mandalorian sets about wiping down the struggling kid’s face with the grim determination of a man who’s tackled this particular task more than a few times before.

“Suppose we’ll have to find somewhere for you to sleep,” he mutters to the kid, who squeals in protest and tries ineffectually to bat the rag away. At moments like this, the two of them seem to inhabit a strange little hiccup in reality, a place where only the two of them exist. Cobb finds himself feeling distinctly like an intruder on the scene, which is completely unfair—he was here first. This is his cantina they’re crashing. Well, not _his,_ exactly, but the point stands.

The ruined door shudders with the force of a particularly vicious gust of wind, seeming for a worrying second as if it might buckle inward. The kid whines and tries to burrow head-first into the Mandalorian’s abdomen, all resentment at the attempted sponge-bath forgotten instantly. 

The Mandalorian’s gloved fingers dance along the child’s long ears soothingly, and Cobb’s stomach does that awful writhing thing again. “There’s a utility closet,” he finds himself blurting. “Might be a quieter place for the kid to sleep, if you want. Safer.” 

Another maddening helmet-tilt that somehow manages to convey more than it should. “You want me to stash him in the closet all night?” the Mandalorian says dryly.

Cobb tosses his hands to the ceiling. “Oh, for—I thought it’d make him feel safe. _You_ walk around with him stuffed in a bag like a—” he fumbles for something someone might stuff in a bag “—an extra pair of pants. You don’t get to claim any kind of high ground, here.”

“Pants,” the Mandalorian repeats slowly. For one wild moment, Cobb thinks he’s overstepped and made the man angry, but then the Mandalorian emits another one of those barely-audible huffing noises and shakes his head in something like amusement. Any tension evaporates so quickly Cobb swears he can feel his ears pop with the change in atmospheric pressure.

The closet, tucked into a snug little alcove, is more than a little musty, but definitely offers a bit more insulation than the drafty cantina proper, and a half-disintegrated basket from a high dusty shelf proves a good fit for the child. The Mandalorian unwinds the cape and cowl from his neck and, after shaking out the worst of the sand, arranges a sort of nest in the basket and installs the child with a startling level of gentleness. The kid warbles skeptically as they shut the door, but judging from that heavy-lidded stare, sleep isn’t far off. It’s been a long day, after all.

It’s strange, Cobb reflects as the two of them head back toward the bar, how the absence of the cape alters the Mandalorian’s silhouette. It’s not that he seems smaller, or diminished, not exactly; it’s more that the bone-weary slump of broad shoulders and the waist pinched by untold years of ascetic living become truly apparent for the first time. 

And there, in that easily-overlooked space between helmet and flightsuit—

“Lookit that,” Cobb hears from some dry throat—his own, maybe. His hand is moving without his permission, darting out to crawl like a pale spider up the knobby topography of the Mandalorian’s exposed nape to pinch a single sweat-limp curl of dark hair between his index finger and thumb. “Human after all, eh?” As if from another room, he watches his own hand give the lock a childish tug. The skin beneath his fingers is inescapably warm.

In the next instant, his eyes are skating across an impassive expanse of dark transparisteel, an iron grip on his wrist grinding all the little bones there together like teeth in the night. The redoubled ache in all the dark little corners of Cobb’s body portend a storm he thought had already arrived.

The orangey last-call lights send up every contour of the Mandalorian’s armor with all the drowsy glow of a half-banked fire, and it’s unclear if the man beneath is breathing, or if he has ever has at all. 

Cobb thinks, _This man could bury me._ The thought is chilly and unfamiliar, as if planted in his head by foreign hands.

Another thought: _I would let him._

The Mandalorian releases Cobb’s wrist after a small eternity, and Cobb’s fingers prickle as the blood rushes back into them. A long, low sigh rattles through the helmet’s modulator, and the Mandalorian says, “Yeah. Human.” And then: “Sorry.” 

“Sorry,” Cobb parrots, and he barely recognizes his own voice.

“Long day,” says the Mandalorian.

“Long day,” says Cobb.

The Mandalorian nods slowly, as if they’ve just had some kind of deeply meaningful exchange, and maybe they have. Cobb nods back. The moment splits open like a black melon, finally releasing the two of them from whatever invisible tether has kept them in this spot. They drift apart—Cobb back to the bar for more spotchka, the Mandalorian to put his back to a wall like he’s the only thing propping the place up.

(If the Mandalorian’s left hand creeps up to touch the back of his own neck once or twice, Cobb pointedly doesn’t notice or mention it.)

“This one was for you, y’know,” Cobb says, nudging the untouched glass of silty water a little further across the counter. “Sounds like you’ve been gargling glass. Armor or no, that sand’ll get everywhere.”

“Thanks,” says the Mandalorian, but he makes no move to peel himself away from the wall. 

Cobb raises an eyebrow and pushes the glass dangerously close to the counter’s edge. The Mandalorian’s only response is to raise one hand and tap twice on his own visor, firmly. Comprehension dawns. “Ah right, sorry. Never take that off, do you?” Cobb says, squinting across the room. Have the lights always been this bright? 

“Never,” says the Mandalorian. “It’s welded to my face.”

Cobb’s jaw works around wordless syllables for a moment as he fumbles for a response to that. Something sympathetic, maybe. The wind, mercifully, chooses that moment to kick up in earnest, screaming through the eaves and making conversation impossible until it settles back to a low roar. 

“I’m joking,” says the Mandalorian in the relative quiet that follows. At Cobb’s silent stare, he shifts his shoulders in a jerky shrug. “Just a joke. It isn’t, uh. It comes off.” 

An undignified snort escapes Cobb. “Yeah, wow, you’re a riot,” he huffs, and sips his drink. “Stays on in public though, right?”

“Stays on if anyone can see me, anywhere.”

“Even during—?”

“If you ask me if it stays on during sex, I’m going to join the kid in that closet for the rest of the night,” the Mandalorian says, sounding suddenly world-weary. 

Cobb’s chin juts out defensively. “You don’t know that’s what I was gonna ask.”

“That’s what _everyone_ asks.”

It takes a monumental effort to bite back the _Well, does it?_ that fights to follow. “‘Fresher’s back there,” Cobb says instead, flapping a hand in the general direction of the facilities. At the Mandalorian’s slightly bemused head-tilt, he adds, “Y’know, in case you wanna clean up. No running water, but there’s, y’know. Privacy. Locks on the doors. Could have a drink. Dust some of that mess off, shake the sand outta your socks. Better’n nothing.” 

For a moment, the Mandalorian hesitates, looking between Cobb and the refresher door. Cobb pours a second glass of spotchka and slides it carefully across the bar next to the water, and to his surprise, this is what seems to galvanize the Mandalorian into moving. “Okay,” says the Mandalorian, hovering by the bar with water in one hand and spotchka in the other. “Thanks.” With that, he disappears into the back of the cantina, and the refresher door shuts firmly behind him, followed by the _snick_ of a lock sliding into place.

Without even the Mandalorian’s stilted conversation, the cantina seems suddenly desolate in a way Cobb doesn’t remember it ever feeling, with the storm wailing pitifully at the door and the unaccustomed light illuminating every broken stool, every spot of filth on the table. 

Cobb picks up the spotchka pitcher and his glass in one hand, hooks a stool by the leg with two fingers and drags it to the ‘fresher door. He arranges himself on the stool next to the door and tops off his glass. Better, he decides, and smiles dopily to himself.

All noise from inside the ‘fresher has come to a dead stop. “Vanth?” says a voice, hoarse and scraped-raw like something dragged across miles of bare rock, but clear and undistorted. Somewhere behind the door, a man is standing bare-faced and alone, human and warm and dark-haired. The realization is a hot and slithering thing between Cobb’s ribs, and his fingers jump around his glass, sloshing luminescent blue liquor over his hand.

“Just figured drinking alone ain’t much fun,” Cobb calls, and he’s proud of the steadiness of his voice. He pats the door amiably, as if it were a shoulder next to his at the bar.

This time, the rasping little chuckle is unmistakable. “For you or for me?” 

“Both, obviously.”

The busy little sounds of movement resume—the rattle of buckles, the click of catches being undone, the soft susurrus of a towel on armor. Cobb sucks spotchka from his knuckles and listens greedily. He’s always considered himself a man of imagination, and it serves him well in moments like this (not that he’s specifically had a moment like this). He hears a buckle being wrestled free, and he thinks of vambraces being shucked from forearms, broad hands massaging wrists gone stiff with exhaustion.

He’s startled by the click of the lock, and to his surprise, the door eases open just a few inches, just wide enough to admit three fingers and an empty glass. 

“Damn, slow down, man, leave some for the rest of us.” Cobb takes the glass and refills it from the pitcher, up to the rim. He passes it back to the Mandalorian, and it disappears behind the door. The hand had been ungloved, gone dark at the fingertips and black under the nails with days of dirt, and Cobb knows that his decision not to let their fingers brush when he handed over the glass was the right one. He suspects that he might have given into the impulse to grab on and not let go, if he had touched. He clears his throat and taps at the door. “Some people might’ve said ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’”

Silence, then a hiss of breath through clenched teeth. The glass emerges again, empty. “Please and thank you.”

“Ass,” Cobb snorts, and refills both glasses. 

The door shuts and locks again, and Cobb leans his head back against the wall, listening for movement. Some fastener is being undone, and there’s the soft ring of armor being placed carefully on the floor. A series of muffled slaps follows—the Mandalorian attempting to bat the sand and dust out of his clothing, Cobb supposes. It’s a pointless endeavor, as any longtime Tatooine resident would know. A sigh threaded with quiet despair echoes from behind the door. “It’s everywhere,” the Mandalorian says. “Absolutely—” another flurry of frustrated slaps “—everywhere.” Cobb’s generous imagination supplies an image of that hand he glimpsed so briefly patting down arms, thighs, a well-muscled chest beneath a fitted flightsuit. He licks his lips and tastes liquor and salt and dust. 

The question is out of his mouth before he can call it back: “So what _do_ you look like under there?”

Behind the door, the Mandalorian goes so still Cobb could almost believe he’s simply evaporated out of existence. “Why?” says the Mandalorian. The voice is low, wary, watchful, the sort of voice that has its finger on the trigger and its eyes on the exits. 

But there’s _something_ there, some small storm-warning that sings through Cobb’s bones and croons to his desert-bred soul. 

“We can call it professional curiosity, if you want,” Cobb says, loud enough to be heard, quiet enough to indicate intention. A memory strikes him—some off-worlder in a Mos Eisley marketplace whispering a serpent out of a basket, compelling it with a sweet wordless tune to dance for passers-by. “Come on. Look in that mirror, there. Gimme something.”

There are footsteps, hesitant and heavy, as if the movement is more than a little involuntary. In the long silence that follows, Cobb strains to hear the Mandalorian breathing.

“Come on,” he says again, soft and sweet as he can manage, a song to tempt a snake from a basket. “What do you look like?”

“Ordinary,” is the eventual reply, so quiet it’s nearly carried away by the storm.

Cobb’s fingertips are on the door now, petting, soothing. “I doubt that,” he says around a laugh. “Come on, now. Work with me here. Your hair is dark. Kind of long, I think. Are your eyes dark, too?”

“...Yes.” 

Cobb hums and nods to himself, distantly thankful that no one can see the dopey smile stretching his cheeks. “Yeah, thought so,” he says. “Suits you, I bet. All dark and brooding and mysterious and whatnot.” 

The Mandalorian makes a strange choked-off sound that might be a laugh or might just as easily be the sound of him choking on a sip of his drink. “I am not brooding and mysterious,” he croaks, and the way his voice cracks on _mysterious_ has Cobb’s smile going all crooked and silly. “I just don’t talk as much as you.” There’s a quiet noise from behind the door, a barely-there rustling as if of fingers scrubbing through hair, nails raking over a scalp. 

At some point, Cobb’s hand crept into his own hair, and his fingers card through it now, dragging the limp unwashed mess of it into ridiculous tufts. “You younger than me? Older? Bet we’re not too far apart.” It’s not so much that he’s thinking aloud—more that he’s voicing thoughts that have been there for days, albeit shunted to the back burner by crises and duty. “It’s in the way you move, y’know. Not like some green young thing that doesn’t know his own body all the way yet, no. You’re at home with yourself, I can tell. Controlled. Tempered, like steel.” 

“You don’t—”

Cobb presses on. “But you live hard. You probably don’t get enough sleep, definitely don’t get enough food. Everything’s close to the bone, with you.” He’s somehow lightheaded and too aware of the density of himself at the same time, swinging between extremes and never quite able to catch his breath. The hinges of his jaw and the tips of his ears have gone hot. “And you’re fine with that, aren’t you? With nothing, no one to take care of you.”

“I don’t need to be taken care of,” says the Mandalorian, and there’s something shivery and unsteady in that gruff voice. 

“I would,” Cobb says. “If you needed it. If you let me. It’d be a privilege.” He’d almost forgotten his hand was still in his hair, and is abruptly reminded when it clenches into a fist, pulling hard.

There’s a quiet commotion behind the door, and Cobb knows without seeing that the Mandalorian has moved to lean against it. They’re inches away, separated by nothing more than a flimsy door that would buckle under any enthusiastic impact, but it might as well be miles. “Would you—” The Mandalorian begins, and stops, clears his throat. A soft thud rattles the door, and Cobb imagines him letting his head tip back against the paneling, dark eyes trained on the ceiling. “Can you... talk to me some more?” A beat, then: “Please.”

Something lurches within Cobb, as if an iron hook has lodged beneath his sternum. Unconsciously, his hand moves to his chest, fingers pressing in. “Of course,” he says softly. “Of course. Although I sorta wish it was you doing the talking. Your voice is different like this, y’know. You sound… hmm, closer, I guess. A little exposed. It makes me wonder about you. About how your face moves. I bet you’re too honest, under there. I bet you’ve always got exactly what you’re thinking written all over your face. Not like you’ve ever had to try and hide it. I bet there’s a lot going on under that visor, and nobody ever gets to see.”

Inches from Cobb’s ear, a long sigh shudders in and out of a mouth he can’t see. Cobb’s thumb pushes up under his red bandanna to stroke along his own collarbone, and he tries to match the sound of the Mandalorian’s breathing, breath for breath, and wonders if the man behind the door can hear him. He fancies, irrationally, that maybe the Mandalorian can feel the rapid scurry of Cobb’s pulse through the door, or even the weight of phantom fingers against his own clavicle. 

“Your hands,” Cobb says. “Are they rough? No, you wear gloves—I bet they’re softer than I’d expect, or at least parts of them are.” He rubs the pads of his own fingers together. “Mine are rough. Sand, y’know. Years of forced hard labor prolly had something to do with it too, I guess. More callus than skin, these days.” 

Something impacts the door hard enough to jostle it in its frame—the side of a fist, maybe. “Strong hands,” the Mandalorian grits out, voice a scraping whisper, but fierce. “Survivor’s hands.

That bone-rattling buzz again, that sour-sharp tug at the back of the tongue that heralds a storm. Cobb’s hand begins to drift, calluses catching on the pilled fabric of his shirtfront on its way down his chest. “And you like them, don’t you?” he says, and sends up a silent prayer to every deity he’s ever heard of that he hasn’t utterly misread the turn this conversation has taken.

For a moment, the faint sound of breathing on the other side of the door seems to stop entirely. “Yes,” is the hoarse reply. 

“If I’d known that earlier, I’d’ve held onto that handshake longer,” Cobb chuckles, fingers kneading circles into his own belly. “But, y’know, hand on glove—that’s not what you really want, is it? You want to feel. Bet you’re sensitive. All that armor all the time, I know how it feels, remember. Safe. Like nothing can ever touch you. Bet I wouldn’t even need you to take it off, though. Bet I could reach enough of you to make it count. Better like that, maybe. Leave you feelin’ like maybe you’re not so untouchable under there, like maybe something can still get through the cracks.”

Another shift against the door, and Cobb pictures a dark-haired man pressing closer, as close as he can, maybe with his palms against the door, maybe tugging fitfully at his own sleeves, maybe pressing his forehead to the door and letting his eyes slip closed.

“Would like to touch your neck again, your hair,” Cobb whispers. “That wouldn’t violate your code, would it? Wrists. Arms. Elbows.” His hand slips lower to trace the rigid lines of his hipbones, enjoying the twitch and jump of the sensitive skin beneath. “You liked it, didn’t you? When I touched you earlier. I shouldn’t have done it, sure, it was out of line. But you liked it. That’s what scared you away, isn’t it? You were scared of what you’d let me get away with. How far you’d let me take it.”

“A reasonable fear, considering,” the Mandalorian says, voice gone ragged and strange. 

Cobb laughs low in his chest. “Guess so, at that,” he murmurs. “Come on, then. Your turn to do some talking. How’d we get here, huh? Tit for tat. What is it that’s caught your eye?”

The reply is, surprisingly, immediate. “The way you stand.” The Mandalorian swallows audibly, and something in Cobb thrills at the sound. 

“Gonna have to explain that one to me, partner,” Cobb prods gently.

“You stand like a man who was taught all his life to bow, but who refuses to give in to the impulse,” the Mandalorian says, and that fierce note has returned to his voice. “Every minute, every second, you make the decision to stand tall. Over and over. I see it. It’s—” He trails off on an unsteady exhale. Cobb almost asks, _it’s what?_ But there are words on that breath, entire volumes, even, unspoken but audible all the same. 

The heat coiling around his lungs has his ribs aching, his heart tripping over itself in its effort to keep up with his racing mind. Cobb lets his head fall back and his eyes slide closed, his hand drifting down to palm the growing bulge of himself lazily through his trousers. 

“How about you let me tell you how it happens?” he says. “You just listen, just do what comes natural for you. Let me take care of you. Tell you a story.”

“A… story?”

Cobb smiles into the empty room, mind afire behind closed eyelids. “Yeah, a story,” he purrs. “This is the one where I do what I shoulda done last night. When it’s dark and you let me back you into some quiet corner, get my hands up under that cowl and touch, just a little bit at first. Make you ask all nice ‘n’ polite for a little bit more. Always better if you gotta ask for what you want.” He undoes the fastenings of his trousers slow, unhurried, luxuriating in the anticipation. “I’m not in the business of taking more than what’s on offer, but maybe you don’t know that. Maybe you’ve got my fingers up on your jaw beneath your helmet and you’re always caught in that second between running and not. Always wondering when I’m going to make some sudden move and ruin you. And I could. But you don’t run. You don’t.”

He draws himself out of his pants, more than half-hard and hot in his hand, and indulges in a few slow strokes, the dry calluses of his fingertips enough to make him hiss and squirm in delicious discomfort. The ambiguous little sounds of movement from behind the door provide ample fodder for his fevered imagination—the creak of the door might be from a man leaning his forearm against it for support as his knees start to tremble, the whisper of skin on fabric might be a palm grazing a demanding swell through a flightsuit.

“I think you’d let me take your gloves off,” Cobb continues dreamily. “Yeah, you do, you let me. You just stand so still and let me pull them off, finger by finger. You let me trace all those lines on your palms, taste them. Yeah, that’d get you, wouldn’t it? Your fingers in my mouth. I might bite, a little. Can’t help it. Makes you jump. I think I like when you get jittery. You’re always so solid. I like to see you nervous.”

“Vanth—” The word is bitten off, as if the Mandalorian doesn’t trust himself with more than that.

Cobb’s grip on his cock tightens incrementally at that one word, just for a second. “Call me ‘Cobb,’” he says. “And shush. I’m telling a story, remember? Rude to interrupt. I’m telling the story where you’re just standing there while I get my fingers up under your sleeves, all the way up to the insides of your elbows. I bet I could find ways to weasel my way under that chest piece of yours. So you’ll remember every time you put on that armor that I’ve been under there, even just a little.”

And there it is, the sharp barely-there snicker of a zipper, a fumbling rustle, an uneven exhale muffled against the door. 

Cobb, feeling suddenly ten feet tall, pauses in his storytelling to spit twice into his own hand. He licks the accompanying string of drool from his lips and sighs into the upstroke, the glide eased by the added moisture. This isn’t going to last long, and he can’t find it in himself to be embarrassed.

“And I make you ask for it, of course,” he continues, a little breathlessly now. “For what you want. If you want me on my knees for you, but no—that’s not what you ask for. I know what you want. You wanna be crowded up against the wall and you want me close. You like how I stand? Well, I’ll make sure you have the best possible view. You’re strong, and you know it. I bet you like to be pushed a little bit. You probably like it this close to too much.”

The sounds from the next room are unmistakable, now—the desperately quiet, frantic movements of a man accustomed to finding what relief he can in little in-between moments. A string of words gasped out in a strange lilting language bleeds through the door, and although Cobb doesn’t recognize the language, he knows the cadence of an absolutely filthy curse when he hears it.

“That’s it,” he says, panting in earnest now and trying desperately to remember the thread of his story as his hand moves faster, too dry for real comfort but too far gone to care. “Just my hands on you. Just touching. Whatever you give me. Whatever you can.”

A wounded, gut-punched sound is hooked out of the Mandalorian’s unseen throat, and by the sound, he’s sliding down the door to the ground, breath stuttering violently. 

Cobb thinks of the man kneeling there on the floor as if in supplication, forehead against the door and bare hand between his legs, dark hair hanging damp over his forehead, dark eyes unfocused. “Good,” Cobb breathes. “Good.” It’s barely a matter of ten more strokes and a particularly savage twist of the wrist to bring himself off as well, chewing the insides of his cheeks to keep from crying out.

It takes several minutes for him to work out which rough breaths belong to him and which to the Mandalorian, several more for him to realize that the storm has settled into nothing more than a low and distant moan. He wonders when it passed. The thought that it might have spent itself as the two of them did is a potent one.

(He wonders if the Mandalorian feels as lonely as he suddenly does, as aware of the space between them.)

He unties his red scarf with one hand and uses it to mop up his fingers and the front of his shirt. It doesn’t help much. “Well,” he says, unable to take the silence any longer. “Good story?”

There’s a shuffling sound from inside the ‘fresher, as if the Mandalorian has shifted himself into a more comfortable position on the floor. “Pretty good,” he says, and there’s a laugh somewhere under his voice, a little self-conscious, a little pleased, a little hysterical. After a moment, he adds, “It’s disgusting in here, though.”

A startled chuckle burbles up out of Cobb, and he tucks himself back into his trousers and pours himself another glass of spotchka. “Well, needs must.”

The Mandalorian hums thoughtfully. “Needs must,” he agrees, and the door is eased open to pass his empty glass out for a refill. Cobb happily obliges.

When the door is shut again, Cobb stuffs his soiled scarf into the pocket of his trousers. The stool he’s sitting on is hellishly uncomfortable and his ass is falling asleep, but he can’t bring himself to get up and move. But he knows the moment is splitting in half as the afterglow fades. “Would you tell me your name, if I asked?” he ventures anyway. 

Inside the little room, the Mandalorian is moving, reanimating, and Cobb hears the sad little sounds of zips and buckles and catches being done up again. “ _Are_ you asking?” the Mandalorian says. His voice is still clear, unadulterated by the helmet, and Cobb savors this last taste of it.

“I don’t know,” Cobb says. 

“Don’t ask now, then.” When the Mandalorian speaks again, it’s filtered through the modulator. “Ask me next time.”

“Next time?”

“Next time.”

* * *

Cobb is unsurprised to wake up alone the next morning, slumped against the wall in the same stool he fell asleep in. It’s early, the light streaming in through the windows still drowsy and grey. The refresher door is wide open, empty. Cobb knows without looking that the closet will be empty, too. He feels every year of his age in the knots of his spine this morning, but all the same, there’s a vital buzz there, too, something left over from the storm.

Something bulges in his pocket, and, upon investigation, he draws out a handful of credits—far more than necessary to fix the broken door lock. Cobb stretches, yawns, and settles back against the wall, filthy and exhausted and smiling stupidly. 

Uluq will be in soon, he knows. He’ll have to explain a few things, and together they’ll sweep away the little sand dunes that have accumulated in the doorways and windowsills in the wake of the storm.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading, buds.
> 
> you can hit me up on twitter (@flamingo_tooth) or tumblr (everyoneissquidwardinpurgatory) if you’re feelin’ it <3

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [The Theory of Harmony](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28942950) by [robotboy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/robotboy/pseuds/robotboy)




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